“Alfa Romeo is a smaller team, with less resources, but is growing up and did a good job” – Kimi Raikkonen. Alfa appears to be in the thick of the midfield battle.

Kimi Raikkonen has joined Alfa Romeo Racing after five years with Scuderia Ferrari, reuniting the 2007 world champion with many of the personnel he worked with at Sauber back in 2001. Yet despite increased investment over the last 18 months the Alfa/Sauber union is still very different to what Kimi Raikkonen enjoyed with his previous employer. However, he believes the team has shown clear signs of “growing up”.

“I think they’ve been doing a good job the last year already, they’re just growing up,” said the Finn. It’s a smaller team, we have less resources on everything but I think they’ve done a good job. It’s a solid package,” he said of the C38. “We have quite a few things to improve but we can go and give a fight, see what we get from there.”

However, in the wake of pre-season testing which showed strong pace from the C38, the Finnish veteran was unwilling to confirm that the team could be challenging for best of the rest this season.

“Nothing is guaranteed, if we are fifth or 10th who knows,” he said. “I think it’s going to be quite close between the mid-pack and if do your job well you’ll be higher up than on off-days when you don’t do it well so we’ll just do the best job we can and go for the first race. We’ll give our best and see what we get in our first race and work from there. We’re not one-hundred per cent where we want to be,” he admitted, “but I think if you ask anybody they’re going to say the same. There’s nothing negative, obviously, we want to improve as anybody, there’s always things to improve on the car, we don’t know where we are and we’ll find out very soon. Conditions are always different to race weekends because of the cold weather, and we didn’t really push for the best lap time,” he said, when asked his impressions of testing. “We tried different tyres and we have things to learn from them also. It was a bit tricky to get a lap time out of the softer tyres. We’ll take what we learned here and go through them and see what warm weather, hopefully, in Australia changes.” – Kimi Raikkonen concluded.